Editors' book-shelf;

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THE EDITORS
EGSX
SHELF
The Wall Street Lawyer: Professional
Organization Man? by Erwin O.
Smigel. Indiana University Press, 1969,
386 pages, clothbound $8.50, paper­back
$2.95.
Those redoubtable bastions of con­servatism,
the Wall Street law firms,
are not as impervious to change as they
may sometimes seem. This conclusion,
based on ably documented evidence,
runs throughout Professor Smigel's
new study of this genus of the legal
profession.
The first edition of his book, pub­lished
in 1964, had been well reviewed
by lawyers themselves and established
the author as an authority, not of the
law, but of how lawyers organize them­selves
and the impact of their organiza­tions
on the attorney himself. Professor
Smigel is chairman of New York Uni­versity's
department of sociology.
The Wall Street law firms are of
widespread interest in H&S, not only
because clients throughout this country
and abroad retain them from time to
time, but also because they are the pro­totypes
of large firms in other cities.
While New York has eleven firms with
100 or more attorneys, there are nine
firms that big elsewhere, including
three in Houston and two in Chicago.
For the most promising young law­yers
fresh out of law school, the large,
prestigious Wall Street firm is still the
place to go, according to Professor
Smigel. It is not simply a matter of
money; many young lawyers today are
concerned with civil rights, for doing
something in a social sense. To attract
and hold such concerned people,
Smigel finds, "The large firms are
giving time off in which to work with
the black and unrepresented."
According to Smigel, the most so­cially
significant change in Wall Street
law firms is the tremendous lessening
of discrimination—especially toward
Jews. He cites one firm in which today
one-fourth of the partners are Jewish,
where in 1957 there were no Jewish
partners at all. Negro law school grad­uates
are in great demand, but they
are difficult to find.
The author observes a trend toward
democratization of staff, along with a
paradoxical formalization of adminis­tration.
Formalization is seen in in­creasing
division of labor; with growth
and complexity comes specialization
and committees. Democratization is
evidenced in the fact that it takes less
time to become a partner now, and the
junior associate has more client contact
than before. Personality is not con­sidered
as important as it once was.
One partner told the author, "You no
longer have to be gorgeous."
Evidently the Wall Street lawyers
have toned up their flexibility, or what
Dr. Alexis Carrel, the prolific writer on
medicine, once called the "adaptive
functions," so as to be in trim for the
ferment forecast for the 1970s.
Up the Organization: How to Stop the
Corporation from Stifling People and
Strangling Profits, by Robert Town-send.
Knopf, 1970, 202 pages, $5.95.
A winner has earned the right to be
critical of the routine way many others
play the game in which he has excelled.
Robert Townsend is an imaginative old
pro in business management, proved
by his record as chairman and chief
executive officer of Avis Rent A Car,
and elsewhere in the corporate world.
He is critical with a vengeance, and
his humor carries a sting.
This book is a collection of short,
specific items of advice, principles,
warnings and rules—many of them ex­aggerated
and irreverent. On the posi­tive
side, the author states specifically
what company managers should do in
order to develop an efficient outfit in
which people pursue their ego and
development needs in harmony with
company goals. A humanist, he believes
that people want to work and achieve;
he rejects the old notion that most
employees must be whipped, threat­ened
and conned.
To liberate the energies of everyone
in the organization, he would do away
with many wasteful trappings that
merely inflate stuffed shirts, such as
reserved parking spaces and posh sta­tionery.
He would cut down the vast
salary gap dividing the top dogs from
the rest of the pack who do the work.
He would throw out rigid policy man­uals
and rigidity of working hours. In
general, he would free energetic, intel­ligent
people to do their best without
being shackled by organization rules
written for unmotivated wage-slaves.
Up the Organization has become a
best-seller because it says what thou­sands
of people have sensed should be
said about big organizationitis, and be­cause
it comes from a man who has
made it in business management. A
healthily subversive book.
King: A Critical Biography, by David
L. Lewis. Praeger, 1970, 460 pages,
$7-95-
A man truly "overtaken by events,"
Martin Luther King in his short and
tragic career epitomized the great is­sues
of mid-century America. He had
all the credentials for the idealist-leader
best equipped to cope with
chaos: magnetism, intellectuality and
a formidable talent for stirring the
masses with words. This biography,
blessedly free of the preachiness and
self-serving bias typical of the rash of
new books on "the cause," is invaluable
equally as a profile of King and as a
straightforward history of the civil
rights movement.
A new minister with a new congre­gation,
King became a champion of
black rights almost by accident. In the
first landmark struggle of the move­ment,
King was elected to head the
Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, se­lected
because he was a newcomer to
town and consequently unknown as a
troublemaker to the white establish­ment.
From then on he was swept up
by events, a procession of headlines:
the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, Albany,
Birmingham, St. Augustine, Selma and
the March to Montgomery, the March
on Washington, Chicago and the first
inroads on Northern type segregation.
In the process, of course, he did make
enemies, arousing the ire of black mil­itants,
who considered him too timid;
frightening the timid black middle
class, which considered him too rash;
arousing the jealousy of other leaders
of civil rights organizations.
It is a measure of the book's worth
that King and his associates are pre­sented
as human beings with human
frailties and not as Christlike messiahs
as propagandized by an uncritical ban­ner
waver. This is a down-to-earth por­trait
that enhances its subject. •